Set away behind Queen Street Gardens, the intimate front-room ambience of the Open Eye Gallery provides an ideal setting for both the small gouache and watercolour paintings of James McNaught RSW RGI and Claire Banks' even smaller pastel, charcoal and pencil drawings.

James McNaught presents us with finely-painted and fastidiously detailed street scenes and still lifes in a chilled, murky palette of greys, blues, and greens. Evocative titles of street-scenes often allude to cities and, in Memory of a City, the Eiffel Tower in the backdrop indicates Paris as a setting. Where you might expect the hustle and bustle of quotidian urban life, however, you instead encounter a single figure donning a winter coat and hat, alone amongst streets of eerily vacuous pavements and closed shutters – even the branches of the trees are left unpopulated.

Steam trains and trams crop up repetitively, their mechanical anonymity failing to take away from the discomfort of the scene: it is as though we are gaining insight into a parallel universe, or a stranger’s lonely and apocalyptic dreamscape. The still lifes maintain this discomfort with their slightest details, from used matches scattered in disarray to the potent red of a blood-like droplet forming from the watermelon in She Keeps Her Secret.

In the next room Claire Banks continues the minimalist and the monochromatic with her set of black and white drawings which repeat the same room, a simple interior drawn up out of five straight lines, altered from one image to the next with changing objects or adornments which serve to confuse our perceptions.

The drawing entitled Water, for example, transforms the interior into a waterproof container, whilst the River flows across the walls and floor in a straight line, questioning the three-dimensionality of the picture plane. In Wallpaper, the delicate and symmetrical birds do indeed form a very pretty wallpaper pattern, but the birds do not actually appear confined to the wall at all; rather, their light shadows suggest that they are gliding through the fictional walls of the fictional interior in perfect flock formation. Perplexing work that caters for enthusiasts of all things intricate.

Three stars

First published 18/10/11